“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree, and he turns away. Show him facts and figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”
Leon Festinger- ‘When Prophecy Fails’

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”
John Maynard Keynes – ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’.

Hi all welcome back to the blog. If you haven’t read last week’s blog on Sabbatai Zevi I’d suggest go check that out first. This week we’re headed in an arc back in that direction as the tale goes on.

Today we join our tale towards it’s climax, at a suburban home in Oak Park, Illinois. The time and date, 6pm, 21st December 1954. A dozen or so suburbanites – just regular Americans really – gather round the lady of the house, convinced she has supernatural powers. They’ve been camped out at the house for several days now. Many have sacrificed everything to be there. Earlier in the day they may have sung Christmas carols on the lawn to onlookers. They stood outside for some time, gazing skyward, hoping their visitor from Clarion, Sanada, would just arrive already. Perhaps feeling the glare of the camera, they retreated inside. If Sanada can traverse galaxies, surely he’ll have no trouble finding 847 West School Street.

The dozen or so people in the house believe the world will end tonight, deluged by a giant flood. They are the select few to be saved by an alien race who have looked down on Earth for eons. Curious onlookers and reporters have been gathered outside all day, waiting to see what happens, when nothing happens after all. Inside, amongst the believers, a small group of interlopers, led by the psychology lecturer Leon Festinger. The lady with the direct line to the aliens? Festinger identifies her as Mrs Marian Keech – in the years since she has been identified as Mrs Dorothy Martin. One presumes the other named figures in this tale are Noms de Plumes also.

Dorothy Martin was a woman who believed in various forms of mysticism. From a young age she’d been drawn to the Theosophical movement of Helena Blavatsky. This led to her studying an American offshoot which would influence later New Age spiritualist movements, Guy and Edna Ballard’s ‘I AM’ movement. From there she discovered ‘Oahspe: A New Bible’, a spiritualist tome, allegedly written by ‘automatic writing’ (where the writer is merely the conduit for a supernatural force providing them the information) by John Newbrough in 1882. This finally led Dorothy to Scientology. Something about the writings of it’s sci-fi author founder L. Ron Hubbard just clicked with her.

In April 1954 Martin begun trying to use automatic writing to speak with her deceased father. She, allegedly, found more than she was looking for. First she claimed earthbound spirits were speaking through her, but she soon claimed she was receiving ‘Astral messages’ from across the universe. First the mysterious ‘Elder Brother’ spoke through her, then aliens from the planets Clarion and Cerus. By mid April she claimed she was in constant contact with a Clarion alien called Sanada.

Word spread among other spiritualists of her conversations with Sanada, and Martin gained a small following. On 23rd July 1954 Sanada stated they would fly past Lyons Field on 1st August. A dozen people went to see the aliens. No-one saw a spacecraft that day, but Dorothy and a number of others recalled a strange man who stopped to speak with them. The man subsequently disappeared into thin air. While seven attendees walked, now convinced Dorothy was a grifter, the others were swayed by lecturer and former missionary ‘Dr. Thomas Armstrong’ and his wife that something strange happened. ‘That man was odd. He must have been one of them. He must’ve wiped our memories of the spacecraft right?’

2nd August Sanada wrote through Dorothy, confirming the doctor’s hypothesis. He also warned Dorothy, for the first time, something bad was about to happen.

Sanada wrote though her again on the 15th August. There wou soon be a huge flash of light in the sky, followed by a flood which would engulf North and South America. On the 27th August, Sanada stated the whole world would flood. He provided a date – 21st December 1954. Dr. Armstrong sent notice of the revelation to as many newspapers as he could. One paper, The Lake City Herald ran the story in a small article on their back page in late September.
Professor Festinger happened to be reading the Herald that day. Spotting an opportunity to study the effects on a group of a strongly held belief being obliterated – surely there couldn’t be a great flood, let alone UFOs on the 21st? – he devised a plan to infiltrate the group.

In the months leading up to 21st December, Dorothy picked up several new followers…. besides Professor Festinger and his assistants. There was ‘Fred Purden’, a student who fell out with his parents over joining the group. He is so tied up in preparing for Armageddon he will flunk his whole year. There is ‘Laura Brooks’, who has given away all her earthly belongings – cause who needs Earth stuff on Clarion, right? – is new. ‘Susan Heath’, a fanatic who has fallen out badly with her dorm-mate and been banned by her college from proselyting, another acolyte. As the day draws near those who work made a pact to hand in their notice. ‘Mark Post’ walked out of the hardware store. ‘Edna Post’ was running a daycare centre – the extremely judgmental look from her boss makes is abundantly clear she has no job to return to if Sanada doesn’t come. ‘Bertha Blatsky’ packed in her job as a secretary. Dr. Armstrong is fired.

21st December played out as follows.

10:00 AM. Dorothy gets a message. “At the hour of midnight you shall be put into parked cars and taken to a place where ye shall be put aboard a porch(UFO)”
Dorothy is told, be prepared for a message every hour on the hour.
Throughout the day members arrive, the press set up. Onlookers gather and some well wishers pop into the house to wish them well on their journey. There are no messages from Sanada.

11.15 PM. A message from Sanada finally comes. He tells them to put on their overcoats and prepare to leave. They will send another message when they were overhead. Followers remove any metal on them, including underwires in their bras and zips, as forewarned by the aliens.

12.00 AM Nothing happens.
12.05 AM one of the followers notices one of the clocks on the wall still says 11.55, they all decide it mustn’t be midnight yet after all.
12:10 AM. Sanada sends a message, something akin to traffic is hell, will be there as soon as we can.
12:15 AM the phone rings. It is not ET phoning, but reporters. ‘What has happened?” ‘Have the aliens arrived yet?’

At 2 AM a younger follower leaves, stating his mother told him she would call the cops if he wasn’t back by 2. Unshaken, the others state this is probably a good thing, he had the least commitment of the group anyway.
At 4 AM the first seeds of doubt crop up. One of the followers bitterly comments they have given up everything, burned every bridge. They know they should leave but have nothing to return to. They have to stay, till the bitter end.

At 4:45 AM FINALLY!!! A new message from the aliens. They are no longer coming, but wanted to explain how big a thing these believers did tonight. Through their show of great faith they have saved the planet. Earth will no longer flood – the people of Earth can thank them alone that humankind is again in God’s good graces.

5:00 AM, a P.S. from the aliens. This news is “…to be released immediately to the newspapers.” They do, finding little tidbits along the way which fit with their narrative. ‘There were small earthquakes in Italy, and California that night… they were the first rumblings of the great disaster Dorothy and her followers averted.

At this point – I should drop back in to the story on Sabbatai Zevi, to add a little bit of context I conveniently left out last time.

Sabbatai Zevi claimed a number of times that the world was coming to an end, and he was there to usher in a new, golden age. In 1648, when he first announced he was the true messiah, he also claimed the world was coming to an end. When thrown out of Smyrna, circa 1651, he had built up a large following – many of whom had sacrificed everything to follow him. Many physically followed him across Europe.

Going from strength to strength, a bandwagon effect happened. More people on board made it less crazy to follow the heretic. Add to this the more people gave, the more justifications came explaining why you should follow him. Tales arose of Sabbatai performing miracles. The movement took on a life of it’s own.
By the time he returned to Smyrna to make his Jewish New Years speech (sorry I didn’t mention he went to Smyrna to make it) he was welcomed as a hero, a local boy made good, among the Jewish diaspora there. This built on top of his, already inflated, image.

With flow on effect on top of flow on effect, across Europe Jewish populations began to party. The messiah had come. He was going to defeat the Turks – then lead us back to Jerusalem. Many thousands of them packed up their belongings and made the pilgrimage to see the great Sabbatai Zevi.
In cities where trade was largely dependent on the Jewish community, like Amsterdam and Hamburg, they all but ground to a halt.

When he was arrested and taken to Adrianople, Muslim citizens mocked the Jews in the streets with chants of “Is he coming, Is he coming?” If they didn’t feel committed to this guy yet, this mockery sure pushed some over the edge. To almost all the Jews this guy was their guy. Thousands of Jews picketed outside his prison, demanding his release. The assassination plot may have been the last straw, but Sultan Mehmet IV was feeling immense pressure over this. The last thing he wanted was a civil war or a bloody insurrection. The Turks saw their best chance to get out of this mess bloodlessly was to try to trick Sabbatai Zevi into converting to Islam.

And, when he did, of course a number of these ‘donmeh’ would follow suit. The longer you are committed to something, the harder it is to accept hard truths about that thing, or person. Even if this runs contrary to everything you have previously stood for. Did the absurdity of their conversion matter? No, because when one is suffering from cognitive dissonance – the word was coined by Prof. Festinger by the way – you find a way of bending reality to reflect your ‘facts’. It is dangerous to think of the cognitively dissonant as dumb – they are smart enough to seize little bits and pieces and dissimulate them into a narrative which matches their preferred reality. The post truth society is not a new thing – it pops into existence numerous times over history. It never really leaves us.

To re-iterate Leon Festinger’s quote at the top of this piece. Someone with a conviction is a hard person to change. Tell them you disagree, and they turn away. Show them facts and figures and they question your sources. Appeal to logic and they fail to see your point.

If only there were a figure in recent memory who epitomized this phenomenon.